Barry O'Farrell takes the fall but ICAC cops the heat

Peter Hartcher

Tony Abbott is correct on his main point about Barry O’Farrell – by resigning honourably, he did the right thing. The question is, did the Independent Commission Against Corruption?

The downfall of the NSW Premier has whipped up two dominant reactions among the uppermost echelons of the federal Liberal Party – fear and anger.

There is fear that the big trawl net of the ICAC could accidentally ensnare much more marine life in the Liberal pond.

You can see this, for example, in the way that the Prime Minister answered a reporter’s question yesterday.

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When asked whether he’d ever met the businessman at the centre of the ICAC inquiry, Nick di Girolamo, Tony Abbott said: “I go to lots and lots of functions and apparently so did he. So I don't for a moment say that I have never met him, but I have no recollection of it.”

This is a more cautious reply than the one he gave a month earlier, when he sent a written reply to a question from the Senate: “The Prime Minister has not met with Mr Nick di Girolamo.”

It’s not that Abbott is under investigation. It’s that O’Farrell was brought down by a failure of memory, or perhaps even a failure of disclosure, on an apparently unimportant detail.

“They were investigating something here where there was no corrupt act,” said a federal cabinet minister.

Nobody – not the ICAC, not even the Labor Party – is alleging that O’Farrell did anything improper to favour di Girolamo.

Indeed, the counsel assisting the commission, Geoff Watson, at the outset and again on Wednesday, specifically ruled out any suspicion of corrupt conduct by O’Farrell.

Whether his lapse was accidental or deliberate, the fact is that the Premier of NSW was brought down over an incidental detail.

With still another ICAC inquiry to come affecting the NSW Liberal Party, how many more accidental victims might there be?

That is the fear. But more than fear, there is anger. Even before the O’Farrell bombshell, another federal cabinet minister had said privately to colleagues: “ICAC is a kangaroo court. It’s destroying the lives of innocent people. The moment they’re named in ICAC, they’re finished, even though there is no accusation, no evidence, nothing.”

That minister can now rest his case after the accidental political murder of O’Farrell at the hands of the ICAC.

But he will not rest it. The ICAC has created a backlash against itself.

Another member of the federal cabinet said: “It’s just ridiculous. Here’s ICAC pulling down a second completely clean Liberal premier” – Nick Greiner was the first – “and what’s happened to Obeid and Macdonald and the whole cabal of corrupt Labor

politicians? Why have no charges been laid against Eddie Obeid?”

Obeid and Ian Macdonald have been disgraced, yet they remain free men, without any charge brought against them.

His implication? That the ICAC has failed to produce enough hard evidence for them to be brought to trial in a court.

“ICAC knows he’s going to get off scot free, so they are spraying everywhere” in the hope of finding the scalps of other crooked politicians, he said.

And instead the ICAC got the wrong man. NSW needs a dedicated and competent anti-corruption body, but the ICAC has set back its own cause by seeming diverted by trivial pursuit when it should be uprooting serious corruption.